Matthew Cox makes furniture and lighting to be as useful and beautiful in a hundred years as it is today. A third-generation antiques dealer turned designer, Matthew builds pieces at the studio’s workshop in Stamford the way the best antiques were built: in natural materials, finished by hand, designed for patina rather than perfection. The company’s 100-year plan carries that thinking into everything it does, from the RE-MC programme of repair, restoration and resale to its certification as a B Corp.
The existing site had done its job. It set the brand apart, with a horizontally scrolling, editorial layout that lived up to the strapline ‘Always out of the ordinary’. But it had been built as an image gallery for interior designers, and the business had outgrown it. Visitors stayed an average of 35 seconds, six in ten left the homepage within 20 seconds, and Google had indexed 500 pages while leaving 463 unindexed. Behind the scenes, a custom CMS made every update a chore, and Shopify was used only to sell finish samples. The brief from managing director Camilla McLean was precise: more enquiries, and better-qualified ones, from private clients who already value craftsmanship and longevity; a clearer journey for the interior designers who specify the work; a back end the team could run themselves; and no dramatic departure, because brand integrity was non-negotiable.
We moved the whole estate to Shopify and designed everything bespoke. No theme, no template: a custom build shaped around how Matthew Cox works. The difficulty with a made-to-commission business is that the platform’s commercial machinery has to recede. Every piece is made to measure or made to order, so the site needed to read as a maker’s portfolio first and a shop second. The horizontal scroll gave way to a vertical one, and the pacing and restraint of the original were kept intact.
The structure does the rest. Collections are split into Made to Measure, RE-MC and Antiques, with the finish library, care guides and furniture diagrams gathered under Resources. A Bespoke page explains commissioning, a Trade page serves designers, and the Story section brings history, the 100-year plan, nature, team and community together in one place. The finish library holds 28 finishes across seven materials, each with a hand-made sample that can be ordered on the spot. We led the project end to end: discovery and technical specification, information architecture, UX and UI design, Shopify theme development, content migration and an organic search migration plan to carry rankings across. After launch we tuned performance with lazy loading, font optimisation and a re-encoded home page film.
Walpole listed the launch in its Daily Luxury Digest in June 2026. The team now updates the site themselves, and Camilla’s verdict was that it is ‘so much nicer to work with’. After launch tuning, mobile PageSpeed performance scores rose from 59 to 82 on the home page and from 39 to 85 on product pages.
The result is a site that feels made rather than assembled, built on infrastructure that will still be standing when the furniture is. Given the brand, that is the only acceptable standard.
